I like carnivorous plants. There’s the man-bites-dog aspect, of course, but there are also all the interesting adaptations that make bug (and frog and mouse and…) eating possible. I grow a few different types – I’ve never had any luck with the canonical carnivore: the Venus Flytrap, but I do have pitcher plants (Nepenthes, Sarracenia and Heliamphora), sundews, pings (butterworts), and utrics (bladderworts).

Heliamphora have a special place in my heart – blame it on George Edward Challenger. I read The Lost World as a kid; a little later when my family was living outside Pittsburgh, PA – I was about ten – the Carnegie Museum or the Pittsburgh Zoological Society (or somebody in Pittsburgh – I can’t find any references on the web) sent an expedition to Auyantepui that got a lot of coverage in the local paper. One of the pictures that sticks in my mind to this day was of a scientist and an enormous clump of helis. For those of you who don’t know from tepuis, click here – they are fascinating mesas in southern Venezuela – sky islands isolated from each other by distance and from the surrounding Gran Sabana by altitude/climate.

With all that as background, a few weeks ago my largest heli, H. neblinae, started sending up an odd looking spike.

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I wasn’t sure what it was – flower spike? Keiki (though I’d never heard of Heliamphora keiki-ing)? I posted a query on a carnivorous plant forum and found out that it was, indeed a flower spike. I suppose I could have waited a week and found out for myself; here’s what happened:

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Notice the very pitcher-like top on the flower scale/sheath – is this a cool plant, or what?

While trying to find some reference to the Pittsburgh expedition, I ran across this:

It was Im Thurns accounts that also attracted British mountaineers Hamish MacInnes, Joe Brown, Don Whillans and Mo Anthonie to Mount Roraima in 1967. They wanted to climb the mountain by a new route and chose ‘the prow’ located at the northern end of the plateau that juts into Guyana. MacInnes’s account can be read in his book Climb to the Lost World. *

Hmm – interlibrary loan time…